Google map plan

Table of Contents

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1. Intruduction

As I was scraping leads for my job hunt, still hunting by the way, I wanted to visualize how businesses are distributed, and little did I know, I found some businesses are located in the sea.

Here is an example:
SpeedTalk® Mobile, a business with more then 18K ratings.


After scraping more data from Google map, processing it, I was able to make this plot that shows, as someone from the community called it: "The distribution of Geo-coding errors"
If you need the graph separately: https://josephelhaddad.github.io/plotly/b_in_sea2

The data set can be found here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1rCXC7h1kgVbcUA0Bu5yXj4NGUbqst2Cl?usp=sharing

2. Quick stats

  • Coordinates distribution

    Coordinates Count Percentage %  
    46.423669 , -129.9427086 97897 73.44 WWWWWWWWWWWW
    0 , 0 5702 4.27 h
    27.698638 , -83.804601 4149 3.11 !
    37.878638 , -122.4203375 3326 2.49 c
    37.7848269 , -122.7073054 1030 0.77 .
    33.8256055 , -118.641338 673 0.50  
    14.1576412 , -106.6918595 562 0.42  
    40.419584 , -73.6754126 427 0.32  
    41.7993125 , -70.3086624 335 0.25  
    34.032332 , -119.134398 325 0.24  
  • States distribution

    State Count Percentage %  
    California 25124 18.85 WWWWWWWWWWWW
    Florida 19333 14.50 WWWWWWWWV
    New York 10294 7.72 WWWH
    Texas 9491 7.12 WWWc
    Ohio 5052 3.79 W
    Pennsylvania 4058 3.04 !
    Georgia 3729 2.80 ;
    Massachusetts 3543 2.66 :
    Missouri 3234 2.43  
    Illinois 3182 2.39  
  • Business types distribution

    Business type Count Percentage %  
    Marketing agency 12282 9.21 WWWWWWWWWWWW
    Marketing consultant 3607 2.70 WWh
    Internet marketing service 3130 2.34 WW.
    Interior designer 2649 1.98 Wl
    House cleaning service 1656 1.24 l
    Website designer 1562 1.17 !
    Electrician 1426 1.06 ;
    Construction company 1300 0.97 :
    Tutoring service 1186 0.88 .
    Painter 1139 0.85  

3. Further investigation

Some members suggests that [46.423669, -129.9427086] could be the [0, 0] (The Null island) of the US, the same way Switzerland have it own anchor.

The [46.423669, -129.9427086] point is to the left of the USA, can it be the center?

To answer this I looked for the 4 most extreme points of the US territories using lists from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_points_of_the_United_States

  • These are the extreme points:
    • Northernmost - Utqiagvik, Alaska: 71.290556, -156.788611
    • Southernmost - Rose Atoll: -14.546667, -168.151944
    • Westernmost - Point Udall (Guam): 13.447556, 144.618194
    • Easternmost - Point Udall (U.S. Virgin Islands): 17.755833, -64.566944

I made an "area" out of the values [71, -14, 144, -64], and turns out, that [46.423669, -129.9427086] is in the center, at least horizontally.
If you need the graph separately: https://josephelhaddad.github.io/plotly/b_in_sea3_orthographic

We might be able to draw a quick conclusions:

  • The clusters we see are probably the coordinates the devs use when invalid coordinates are inputted.
  • The randomly placed business locations, that often single, are probably intentional.

Date: 2025-01-09 Thu 20:29

Created: 2025-11-10 Mon 04:13

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